Pakistan is in the process of enacting education reform, introducing new programs and legislating increased access to schools. A recent law, the Sindh Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, adopted last March, mandated that the state fund education for children between 5 and 16 years old. However, only one provision of that law has been enacted: the distribution of free textbooks to children in first through tenth grade.
Recent reports indicate that the Sindh province, Pakistan’s second most populous, lags far behind other areas of the country. A survey in 2012 reported that 32 per cent of the province’s children between ages six and 16 were out of school—more than in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the country’s north that are beset with terrorism. Similarly, FATA students performed better in measures of quality than students in Sindh, outperforming them in arithmetic and English.
Some complain that the government has slackened in its oversight of the Sindh school system since the 1980s, resulting in school shutdowns and an overall decline in quality. “With no government attention paid to school monitoring, schools began to shut down and no new schools were opened in response to increasing population,” said Dur Mohammed Buriro, an education campaigner. According to Sindh’s education minister, Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, some 3,000 schools are currently closed in Sindh, along with another 28,000 without power, and 20,000 without water. Bruiro said that the first priority for Pakistani schools should be increasing enrollment. “If there are no students in schools, then who will get the free and compulsory education?”
Creative Commons Love: Shaun Metcalfe on Flicker.com
Written by Alex Leedom